


Bulletproof

by doomedship



Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23299564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomedship/pseuds/doomedship
Summary: Alternative ending, Julia's speech at St Matthew's goes uninterrupted.
Relationships: David Budd/Julia Montague
Comments: 22
Kudos: 168





	Bulletproof

**Author's Note:**

> Some backstory, I wrote this in November 2018. I've had it languishing in my phone since then. I believe it was a prompt response for something like "what if there was no bomb and Julia lived".

She makes it through.

By 5:48pm her speech at St Matthew's is over and and abruptly he can breathe again, choking on irregular gasps of air that taste of nothing but adrenaline. He watches her step off the stage, the steady applause blurring to nothing like there's cotton wool in his ears as he looks up at her, meets her eyes, the thousand things they still haven't said riccocheting silently through the air between them.

"7-9, Lavender on the move."

It's a phrase he's already uttered a thousand times over but now he says it one more time, looking right there into her eyes, and knowing that from here on out everything is different.

He won't be her PPO much longer; she's already made that much clear.

The only thing unresolved is whether he'll be something or nothing at all to her after he's been replaced.

He walks her out of St Matthew's, his head exploding in a minefield of chaotic thoughts even as he slides her behind him to make sure none of the dogged remnants of the protesters can get at her. By now, their supply of supermarket ammunition has finally been exhausted, and he gets in the front seat mercifully unmarked.

It's always hard to wind down after a big job like this one; even more so when his head is a mess. 

He never expected her to want him.

To want him to choose her.

He can't stop replaying her words from before her speech over in his head, the tempting allure of such unrestricted promise filling him with a hedonistic rush even as the very same scares the life out of him.

He wants to ask her, did you mean it? Wants to beg her to stop playing games, to be straight with him, and tell him what she really means.

But the truth and the problem is, he knows she already has.

And even as he wonders whether he still hates her he knows he also loves her.

They can't speak, not throughout the car journey back to her office, and then still not when she returns to her glassy cage of an office, and directs her staff with her usual sharp words and an iron will. Anne Sampson walks out looking murderous as usual, and as he watches Julia rise with a face like tempered steel, he wonders how a woman who is so tender with him can also be this harsh.

He doesn't get a single word in with her beyond the formulaic words of his job until much, much later, when he's walking her up into her flat and finally, suddenly, they are so very alone.

The sudden overwhelming weight of the moment almost makes him turn tail and run back down the steps to avoid the siren song of intimacy, the daring leap from propriety and formality into the messy web of personal choice and decisions. But before he can even contemplate the door, he looks over and meets her eye, and he finds something there that rinses away any thought of leaving.

"Sorry it's so late," she says to him, offering a small half-smile. She looks tired, but there's an underlying restlessness about her, a fidgeting energy that she doesn't usually have, and he recognises it as one that has started to possess him too.

She hangs up her coat, walks into her living room; glances back at him with steady and unapologetic eyes.

"I'm just glad it all went smoothly," he answers unsteadily, taking a few short steps towards her. Jacket still on, Glock in the holster against the small of his back. Endlessly uncertain. She smiles knowingly then, and crosses the rest of the space to reach him.

"Let's not avoid the elephant in the room," she says with enviable calm. "I think we both know we need to talk."

He nods, but the right words don't come to rescue him. She smiles wryly at his sudden silence.

"I hope I haven't scared you off," she says, and she sounds so confident and collected, just like she always does, but he knows politicians, knows her by now. She's every bit as frightened as he is. He can see it in the tense line of her jaw, the curl of her fingers at her sides.

"No," he finally replies, meeting her eyes at last. "It's just, I thought I'd be the one scaring you off."

"Because of the other night?"

He inclines his head. She glances away once then back at him quickly.

"David, it worried me, but it's not as if you set out to hurt me, is it?" she says, spreading her hands, as if it's just as simple as that, the absolution of all his guilt. He wonders, then, whether in her eyes it is.

"You see, I meant what I said, David," she says quietly, and hesitantly she reaches out, brushes his hand with the side of hers. Looks up at him sidelong, a sudden hesitation entering her expression. "I want you here with me. Just not as my staff."

He takes her hand, closes his eyes.

"I don't want to end up hurting you," he admits. As he looks back at her there are a thousand lies and deceptions running through his mind; lies he has already told, and all the lies he knows are yet to come.

She studies him for a long moment, and he wonders whether she can see right through him too.

"I'm not ruling out the possibility that this will turn out to be an unmitigated disaster that we both regret horribly. But to me, this is worth more than just an illicit shag after hours."

She gestures absently between them, and then turns around, heads for the kitchen. She's filling the kettle when he follows her slowly in. There's enough water for two.

He waits til she glances at him questioningly and then the dam suddenly breaks.

"Anne Sampson's had me keeping tabs on you."

.....

The silence which follows his confession is magnificent.

He doesn't think he could have timed it better or more inappropriately, the growing racket from the kettle becoming increasingly absurd the longer her silence stretches out. Her back is to him now and he feels like he's got his head on a chopping block, just waiting for the axe to fall.

The kettle rocks and rattles and finally, even that clicks into silence too.

Julia turns around.

"I assume you have reasons," she says tightly, and it's impossible to tell how angry she is. He swallows hard.

"Lorraine Craddock very heavily suggested there might not be resources for my family's safehouse for much longer," he replies forcefully, the words like bitter bile on his tongue.

Julia looks back at him, unblinking, utterly unreadable.

"You could have come to me," she says. "Such things have been known to be within my remit."

He shakes his head, wordless, unable to express how he both desperately wanted to and desperately could not; how tangled he's become in this web of secrecy and deceit. 

He can't tell her that he has never known whether she is someone he can trust.

In the end he doesn't have to. He can see the shutter fall across her face, the iciness entering every line of her body as she shakes her head, finally looks away.

"Well then. Thank you for clarifying. I've no further need of your services," she says, her jaw set and her eyes like a hard stone wall. He closes his eyes.

"Julia-"

"I'll request your transition to another assignment tomorrow."

He stares at her, suddenly drowning in this feeling, this stark realisation that the walls have just caved in on him, crumbling piece by crumbling piece.

_You got what you deserve._

He can't do much else but leave, and when he gets home all that's waiting for him is the ever-expanding silence, which is becoming his constant companion these days. 

He turns on the TV to banish it for a while, and cracks open a beer, then another. Vicky doesn't answer when he calls, and he throws the remote against the wall, then regrets it when it no longer works. The silence is deafening without the TV on.

At eleven, he falls into bed in a pit of isolation, frustration and remorse, and sleeps only fitfully, for broken half-hour stints.

In the morning he dresses for work. It's like clockwork, but it's now become a slow walk to the gallows, and as he leaves his flat he tries his best to numb himself to the pain that lies ahead.

It's about as awkward a situation as you can get, the fact that they have parted on the bitterest of terms but he still can't not show up today to protect her.

More than anything, though, he hates the part of himself that's still glad he's got a reason to see her at all.

"Morning ma'am," he says robotically as the door opens.

She looks right through him.

It is painful going.

She doesn't let up all day, her sub-zero treatment of him much worse than her anger would have been. He thinks he could have handled that, could have rationalised anger whereas her silent disdain lingers in his mind like a toxic fog which he can never clear. He hates that she can be so dispassionate, can keep her emotions on such a tight leash that she doesn't even acknowledge his presence at all, and strides through her day like nothing can touch her.

He wants to yell at her to look at him, to feel something, and to face what's passed between them head on like real people do. But instead he says nothing, calls her ma'am and walks a step behind her. Just like the little tin soldier he can feel himself becoming.

And at the end of the day he finds himself going home alone again at the end of another long day, not a word exchanged between them still.

Vicky answers when he calls this time, and for a while he's relieved. They talk, mundane chatter that means so very little, but at least it's a break from the silence.

"Everything all right, Dave?" Vicky asks carefully, after a long and painful pause. He knows she is wary about getting in too deep with him again, of unleashing all the demons which just aren't her responsibility anymore. So he tries his best to keep a lid on it.

"I'm fine," he lies. "Ella and Charlie all right at school?"

"Yeah. Charlie's excited to start his new school," Vicky says. "Won't stop talking about it. Did you ever find out who on earth got involved to help with his transfer?"

It throws him for a moment, and he presses his palm against his forehead, slumped on the sofa in his boxers and an old t-shirt.

"No," he says. "I don't know who that was."

It's not really a lie, since he goes to bed every night wondering who Julia Montague really is. 

.....

He gets the summons from Craddock the next day. He goes in to see her, thinking it better to accept his poison quickly than to draw it out in a slow death.

"What did you do to piss her off?" she demands bullishly, angry that her pet spy has lost his in.

"I'm sorry ma'am, I couldn't say," he says tonelessly. If he has his doubts about Julia they are nothing compared to what he thinks about Craddock, a woman who was willing to dangle his two innocent children as bait in her toxic game of chess.

He thinks he can see it, her and Sampson a pair of black queens together on the other end of the board to Julia.

And him?

A pawn, he thinks. A pawn who dressed as a knight, but a pawn all the same.

Sent back and forth between those queens and never knowing enough to decide.

"Well it's bloody annoying, David, I'll tell you that," snaps Craddock. "You were our only way in to Julia's wretched business with Hunter Dunn and now God knows what they're getting up to behind closed doors."

He can only sit there and wait for her to run out of steam, and complaints, and personal insults. It takes a while, but eventually she turns to him, hands on hips.

"Well I can't get her a new PPO overnight," she says, her eyes gleaming. "You'll have to finish out next week with her. And a word of advice, David." She takes a few steps towards him and he feels every inch of his skin prickle like he's just seen a viper in the grass.

"Get back on her good side. I don't care what you have to do. But don't fuck this up."

Craddock doesn't bother threatening his kids and Vicky again. She knows he knows she'll make that threat, and the sinister vein runs through her words without it.

He leaves the station feeling sick to his stomach, and the feeling doesn't leave him as he climbs into bed, and turns his head into the pillow so he can break down quietly under the crushing weight he now carries alone. 

.....

He looks shot through in the morning and he suspects he's had less than two hours of restless sleep. He's wound tight like a spring and he desperately doesn't want to endure another day of Julia's glacial vengeance, but he's got no choice but to show up on time in suit and tie like every other day. 

She takes a calculating look at him as he meets her at her door and he knows she's noting the deepening lines in his face and the dark shadows under his eyes, but she keeps her silence as she brushes past.

He's flagging badly by the evening and eventually she seems not to be able to bear ignoring him any longer.

"You look like shit," she says coolly.

"I feel it," he answers. He's tired, so tired, doesn't want to dodge and evade and bullshit anyone tonight.

He thinks he sees a flicker of something like compassion on her face before she turns away.

"Go home and get some sleep. I don't want my PPO completely insensible from sleep deprivation."

"Yes, ma'am," he says, and the cold sets in a little deeper in his bones. He turns to go.

"Sergeant Budd."

He pauses, wary, glancing back at her, not foolish enough to hope for a reprieve. She regards him steadily, her mouth a tight line.

"Your family's safehouse is guaranteed for at least another thirty days," she says stiffly. "More if needed, pending the outcome of the investigation into Heath Bank."

He blinks.

"Thank you, ma'am, I didn't think-"

"That's all."

Her brush off is obvious, but his feet remain glued to her floor even as she folds her arms and turns away from him.

"Julia," he says, and she flinches. Reveals a tiny crack in that unrelenting armour she wears. "I'm sorry. I tried to do what was best for my family, and for you."

"Well, I'm afraid I don't think I see how informing on me to people who want me well and truly gone is in my interests, David," she says coldly. 

"I only gave them information that they could already have got without me. I kept back everything I could." He hears his voice rise, his frustration and his despair creeping into his tone, and he knows it's the wrong move. Julia never meets a challenge softly. 

"Very big of you," she says, her voice ominously low. "But you see, David, when it's apparent that your life is in danger because someone is leaking information about your whereabouts, it's not a reassuring thing to find the person who's supposed to be protecting you is in fact nothing but a spy for your enemies."

Every word is carved sharp like a tiny barb needling his skin as she stands there with fire in her eyes and betrayal on her lips. He stares back at her for a moment, and the horrible implication of her words almost undoes him.

"You don't think- Julia, I would never-"

"No," she says shortly. "But two days ago I'd have said you were the one person who'd never inform on me either, so you'll forgive me if I consider that all is not as it seems with you, Sergeant Budd."

He can do nothing else but leave in the face of the utter betrayal and smouldering ashes of her faith in him.

She has every right to doubt and hate him but it still cuts him to the bone that she does.

As he strips the tie from his neck and throws his gear recklessly to the floor in his godforsaken silent flat he rages against the day he was ever put under Lorraine Craddock's rule. For the first time in a long time, he seriously entertains the idea of walking away once and for all.

He once told her nothing complicates his job but God knows this is a bitter mess he's made. 

.....

On Wednesday Julia is speaking at the Belgian embassy, and he rides in the front seat in the car with her as usual.

Craddock is still doing everything to slow the process of his transfer, insisting there's no suitably trained officer available immediately, though he's no longer sure if it's because she still thinks she can use him or because she wants to punish Julia with a half-assed disgruntled PPO. He opts to despise her either way, and if it's the latter then she's well wide of the mark, because he doubts he's ever been more incentivised to protect her than he is now, guilt ridden and still tormented by his unbidden feelings for her.

Craddock has lost her leverage over him anyway since Julia got involved, and David feels no fear in telling her that he's got no information about Julia's movements.

"I'm afraid she's become unwilling to disclose anything to me," he tells her, and it's nothing but the truth.

Craddock is pissed and dismisses him without another word. But he stays Julia's PPO.

He focuses wholly on ensuring her physical safety, as if somehow achieving that will atone for his failure to guard her trust in him.

The longer he has to stew on it the more he thinks he's been a fool to be taken in by Craddock and Sampson in the first place. His fear for his children's lives had been so overwhelming he failed to work out that Julia was always the safer place to bet.

As he comes to fetch her before her speech he is starkly reminded of the last time he did so, and of the tender words he's so callously thrown away. As she stands to pass him in stony silence he's suddenly unable to resist against all better judgment. He grabs for her hand and holds it, stopping her in her tracks like he's just electrocuted her.

She wheels to face him angrily, but he shakes his head and wills her to just listen, for once. By some miracle she does stay silent, her eyes hard and annoyed but her mouth firmly closed.

"I know it's too little too late, but I swear I am doing everything in my power to protect you," he says bitterly. "I always have, and I always will. You don't need to worry about that." His thumb runs over her hand, and for a moment he sees the indecision in her eyes.

He thinks she will reject him, throw his words back in his face as he deserves, but instead she hesitates, looks at him with guarded unease.

"Home Secretary, they're ready for you."

It's one of her aides, all nervous energy and loud words, and Julia abruptly pulls her hand from his and steps widely away from him, straightening her jacket and giving him one last inscrutable look before she frowns and picks up her papers.

Suddenly she's no longer Julia but the Home Secretary, and he takes his cue. He sets his expression to blank again and opens the door for her, leading her out to face the crowd of assembled dignitaries.

His throat never stops constricting whenever she's up on stage. He hates to see her exposed, vulnerable, and his alertness is dialled painfully up to eleven. He can feel the thump-thump of his heart against his ribcage, and wills himself to pull it together. He cannot let her down.

And then it happens suddenly and all at once.

Shots fired in the hallway. His attention diverted. He recognises the threat a split second later; too late.

Someone has a gun trained on Julia.

Another pointed at his head.

He can see Kim slumped on the floor on the opposite end of the room; dimly he wonders if she's dead or unconscious, but he can't think, can't breathe, feels like he's back in the relentless gunfire of Helmand all over again.

He cannot formulate a plan.

Julia is bundled off screaming by someone in a black mask. David struggles, shocked back to life by the sound of her distress, and is only rewarded by a dull fire burning rapidly through his side.

A swift blow to the back of his head is the last thing he is aware of.

.....

He wakes in hospital hours later with her name on his lips.

"Where's Julia?" He says thickly.

"What's that, lovey?" asks the nurse, too busy with his chart to engage. He looks around wildly.

"She's unaccounted for."

David turns his neck, ignoring the sharp throb in the back of his head, and it's Louise Rayburn loitering by the doorway. She's looking at him strangely, but he doesn't have the presence of mind to put it together with his inappropriate use of Julia's name, and he rounds on her sharply.

"What do you mean unaccounted for? How the hell could we lose her from an embassy? Security was through the roof!"

The nurse gives Louise a reproving look as she hangs up the chart.

"Don't you go getting him all upset now, you hear?" she says severely, wagging one weathered finger at her.

Louise ignores her and walks in with her arms folded, sitting in the chair by the bed.

"We don't know," she says flatly. "It seems a group of Belgian nationals entered the embassy under false authorisation and waited in the audience until Julia was onstage. The individuals we caught have links to the cell behind the 2016 Brussels attacks."

He sits in stunned silence.

This news means Julia is most likely dead by now.

"I'm sorry, David," says Louise, but he can't really hear her. Her voice is an echoed blur and he feels his heart start to race. He tries to swing his legs out from the covers though he has no idea where he'll go. Where to find her.

"Hey, stop it," Louise says, alarmed. "David, you've been shot three times. You need to rest."

He stares at her, trying to understand her, and then he realises that yes, there's a dull aching pain radiating through his side.

At least it's the one that's already been blown to pieces once before.

"How bad is it?" he asks dumbly as he touches the thick bandage dressing on his middle.

"You were lucky, your vest stopped the worst of it. But one bullet went clean through."

"Doesn't sound too lucky to me," he says. He is almost overwhelmed by the desire to leave the bed, to get out and start combing every single street to find out what had happened to Julia.

He already knows he won't rest until he finds the truth. 

.....

It's an agonising wait to be released from the hospital. Louise is compassionate enough to visit and pass on a few details of the investigation into Julia's abduction and probable murder, but scarcely more than the non stop news coverage lets on. It drives him mad.

"Find out who Richard Longcross is," he tells Louise one evening. She looks at him like he's mad, or an idiot, or both.

"Who?" She asks, and David sighs.

"Bloke I caught visiting Julia in the hotel. Didn't want to identify himself. I'm positive he's security service."

"That's not enough to go on, David," Louise says, rolling her eyes.

David counts down the days until he's let out of hospital and can do the job himself. 

.....

"Don't be ridiculous, David, this isn't your area. You're a PPO. You're not getting involved in this investigation."

Sharma is getting pissed with him. He's been backseat driving the whole thing since he got out of hospital and Sharma isn't having it. He's already on edge because in the embassy they lost Tom and two other officers and Kim's still in a coma, and his department is no closer to finding out how or why.

Sharma draws the line at David trying to use police resources to track down Longcross based on nothing but a hunch.

He doesn't stop for a second though because if he does, his mind strays back to the unacceptable thought that Julia is most likely dead, and died not knowing that despite it all he chose her and chose her with every single choice he had.

That she died without him by her side.

CCTV footage shows a convoy of black Range Rovers speeding away from the embassy. They split up in different directions and make it impossible to follow the trail because they can't see which car Julia was put in. The car registrations run through an untraceable shell company in the Cayman Islands, and they hit a brick wall.

Two weeks after he's discharged from hospital he discovers that Nadia spent seven years living in Brussels.

How no one noticed up to then he has no idea but it's the link they've been desperate for.

Nadia's reluctant to talk but in the end she reveals the fact that Longcross has been in contact with her husband, and knew of her family still in Belgium.

Half of whom turn out to be already in prison for terrorism related offences.

A few days later he runs into Chanel Dyson in a coffee shop in Chelsea. Doesn't recognise her at first because she's smiling instead of screaming and anyway, it's been weeks since she even crossed his mind. But she is all charm and sweetness and she sympathises about Julia, and he doesn't believe a word she says.

But he thinks she might just know something.

He agrees to meet her in some uptown bar on Friday night. He dresses carefully with his Glock concealed under his jacket. Greets her with a smile but doesn't let her touch him, and makes sure he sits on the inside seat with his back to the wall so he can watch the rest of the bar and not be ambushed.

"Funny that we should run into each other under these circumstances, isn't it?" he says casually, though his eyes bore straight into hers.

Chanel tries to shrug it off, laughs a bit, looks around nervously. He can tell she's waiting for someone.

He leans in close to her.

"In five minutes I'm going to be out of here, Chanel, so don't bother waiting for your boyfriend to show up," he murmurs. "All you need to know is I'm going to find whoever did this to Julia. And believe me, you don't want to be someone who didn't help me do it."

Her eyes widen; she's not cut out for this, not really, no matter how corrupt the company she keeps she isn't herself a player in this game. She's a spectator but she doesn't want to fully look and she's faltering now he's put it right in front of her.

"Look, don't go after her, David," she says lowly. "You don't know who you're dealing with."

"No," he says. "Not yet. But I will."

Chanel shifts and an agitated look crosses her face. "Think about it," she says in a voice that's barely more than a thread. She looks around the whole time that she speaks. "Julia's whole platform was anti-terrorism. The one thing that'll make RIPA 18 more popular than ever is a terror attack that cost her her life. It's not my friends you need to look for."

David stares at her, but he doesn't dare to push his luck and he vanishes before whoever she thinks he should be afraid of shows up.

He realises now: in Julia's disappearance he's found the murky intersection between government and criminal; it's the sordid lengths some will go to to serve their own ends, even if the way is paved entirely in blood. And more than one person who should be whiter than white is right in the middle of it.

.....

He's in the office going back over and over the facts with Louise when the news breaks over the radio.

There's been an explosion in an office block in Greenwich. A big one.

The office belongs to a Cayman Islands business. The numbers match the registration of the Land Rovers from the Belgian embassy.

They race to the scene and find it still live. The first response units are unable to enter the premises because of the risk of further IEDs.

He's the first to volunteer to go inside.

The adrenaline is wild and he thinks his chest might explode from the force of his heart beating a vivid staccato, but it dulls into nothing when he reminds himself that the answers to where Julia is might yet be hiding in this burnt out office block.

He follows the sound of gunfire to a first-floor room at the back of what's left of the building.

Screaming.

No time to process who that voice belongs to.

His world is blurring at the edges.

There's a dead man on the left and someone else about to follow him into hell lying on the right.

He doesn't know who he's firing on but it doesn't matter, because suddenly, Julia's in the room and it's like a thunderbolt's gone through him. And then he's got a reason to let his lungs expand again, and recklessly he lunges out of cover, fires, takes out the shooter across the room.

Julia's staring at him covered in blood and looking like she's seen a ghost.

He stumbles across the room to her, heart still pounding wildly and his fingers still gripping painfully on the trigger of his gun.

She is alive.

He shaking uncontrollably as he wraps his arms around her and she sobs with relief and terror and trauma into his shoulder.

"God, Julia, I thought you were dead, I'm so, so sorry," he says desperately into her hair. "I'm so sorry. You're all right now. I'm sorry."

He feels her shoulders shaking as she clutches the edges of her jacket and shakes her head.

"David, just get me out of here," she chokes out, and he nods, trying to rein his freewheeling emotions back into harness so he can play the part, can hold it together long enough to deliver Julia to safety just once more.

One more mission to save her life.

He places her square behind him as he opens the door.

.....

Hours later Julia's being seen in hospital and he's pacing desperately in the counterterrorism offices. He can't tell them why it matters so much that he be in the hospital waiting room instead, so he has to wait it out with Sharma and Louise and everyone else.

He checks his phone obsessively in case she contacts him, though he knows she's probably not had a phone in weeks and anyway, she's surely got other people to tell long before she thinks about him.

"Listen, you did a really good job in there," Louise says, touching his arm. "Why don't you get some rest at home, David? I think we should talk about counselling in the morning. You've been through something really traumatic these past few months."

He looks at her strangely, wondering who she is to comment on his wellbeing, his state of mind, when she's practically a stranger, doesn't know him at all.

But then he thinks, maybe he's reached such a dark place now that everything is written all over his face. No more hiding the darkness of his demons within.

So he nods and accepts the out, and heads straight to the hospital instead, only to discover Julia's been discharged already.

He comes up against Craddock instead.

"Stephen Hunter Dunn has been arrested," she says, and there's more than a hint of glee about her.

"Where's the Home Secretary?" he cuts to the chase tiredly, long since worn out by this woman's political games.

"Back at the hotel. She's under 24 hour protection, of course." She sounds annoyed that he doesn't indulge her desire to gloat.

He excuses himself and heads straight to the hotel and suddenly he's back in the place where it all began. Walking the same corridor he walked the night of Thornton Circus.

Walking to Julia, seated on the couch again.

"Hi," he says softly, standing in the doorway. She jumps a bit, broken out of a reverie, and she looks up at him, the deja vu of this moment not lost on her either.

"Hello," she says, standing, setting her glass down on the coffee table. "I wasn't sure you'd come."

He's shocked; how could he stay away when he's thought of nothing else for weeks, when the only thing keeping him sane all this time is the hope that he might yet see her again, and yet here she is, the doubt still fresh in her eyes.

It's all he can do to stumble across the room and draw her fiercely into his arms.

"Wherever you are is where I'm going to be, all right?" he says, and holds her just a little bit tighter. Slowly, he feels her slide her arms around him too, a shaky breath falling from her as she starts to let go of the tension wound up in her body.

They sit facing each other on the sofa, implausibly, impossibly together.

"When I was in there all I could think about was how the last thing I said to you was that I couldn't forgive you." Her voice cracks but she carries on, shaking her head slightly. "I was desperate for that not to be how you remembered me."

"That was never how I thought of you," he says, grasping her cheek in one trembling hand. "Never. All this time I've only been thinking how stupid I was to let you down in the first place. I'm so sorry, Julia."

She blinks back tears.

"No, David. I understood," she says. "I was angry, but I know what it's like, living this life. Being backed into a corner. And it was your family." She shakes her head. "I was angry at you for not trusting me, but it wasn't just that. It was the fact that being close to me put you in that position in the first place. That you'd have been better off if you'd never known me at all. It was just easier to blame you than to acknowledge that. So I'm sorry, David."

He pulls her in close and runs his fingers through her hair.

"No, please don't apologise to me. I never thought I'd be able to do this again, I-"

He breaks off, overcome, and she's crying as she reaches up and kisses him, and the blazing joy of it is almost pain.

Rediscovering her is searingly, achingly good, and for a brief, glorious interlude he is lighter than air.

Then later, when he's lying next to her in the rumpled bedsheets he finally feels himself start to give in to every feeling he's been keeping at bay for weeks, and he buries his head in his hands and breaks down under the intensity of it all.

She's alarmed but she doesn't fall back; doesn't run from this frighteningly visceral display of the damage which has always been lurking within and which she's already seen once before. Instead she puts her arms around him and engulfs herself with his pain, a trauma that is mirrored in the slow lament of her own suffering. She might never have fought in the war she gave her blessing to but she's lived a soldier's life and he starts to think maybe it's okay for her to sit there beside him and understand. 

.....

That night he sleeps beside her, a risk she chooses to embrace, and at dawn he wakes up with his fingers still touching hers.

She wakes up later, slowly, and turns over to face him with the slow smile he's come to know is reserved only for these quiet moments, moments where he realises he is witness to the truest version of Julia Montague, finally without her limitless disguise.

He has made his peace with the multiplicity of self her life demands, and thinks that as long as he gets to see her as she is now, he will never truly have cause to doubt her again.

"I wasn't sure I'd ever be waking up to this again," she says, running her fingers over his jaw and sighing at the rasp of stubble against her skin. He smiles, reaches up to grasp her hand and then rolls, suddenly, so she's beneath him with one hand firmly pressed above her head.

"I fully intend to make up for lost time," he says, resting his forehead against hers.

And so he does.

The rest of the world can't wait forever, though. There's people coming in to check on Julia and to tell her what a bloody mess there is in government now the head of the security service has been arrested on suspicion of terror offences, and meanwhile there's another acting Home Secretary and a prime minister about to be toppled, and what does she think they should do about it all.

She waves her hand in the face of it all and says she doesn't want to know.

"Not today," she says. "I've got business to attend to today."

.....

She goes with him to book an appointment with the occupational therapist later that day.

He's reluctant, afraid, and she looks back at him levelly and says it's his choice. He thinks back to the last time she offered him a choice and thinks that this time he'd damn well better make the right one.

So he goes. And breaks down. And goes again and breaks down again and so it goes on.

And in time he starts to find places to put the broken bits of himself that don't hurt so much anymore.

He's not deluded; this is no quick fix. But it's a start, and he starts to realise that for the first time since he returned from the war which gave him his demons, he is no longer living in silence.

He lives with her before the year is out and they fill their home with warmth and a freshly grown trust which he works very hard to nurture this time. In time, he learns to keep nothing from her; in return she stops holding so many secrets, or at least tells him plainly when it's just not for him to know. He can make his peace with that; he knows her life is so many shades of grey.

The main thing is, she is by his side, and he is by hers.

And this is the choice they make.


End file.
